Who was the first maid expelled from Baoyu's house?

The answer

Xueqian. Baoyu, drunk and angry that his maple-dew tea had gone to his old nurse, calls for the maid to be dismissed in chapter 8 — and by chapter 20 she is simply gone.

The famous cases came later

Jinchuan, dismissed by Lady Wang in chapter 30 and drowned by chapter 32; Qingwen, expelled in chapter 77 during the searches, dead within it.

Why it matters

The novel lets a drunk boy's word destroy a maid without a scene — the quiet version of an expulsion it will later show twice at full volume.

The maple-dew tea night 楓露茶

Chapter 8: Baoyu comes back from the Pear Fragrance Court with wine in him and asks for his maple-dew tea — the kind that takes three changes of water and an afternoon. He learns his old wet-nurse Li Nanny has drunk it. Drunk, furious at the familiarity, he smashes the cup and calls for the maid who let it happen to be sent away: that maid is Xueqian. The household calms him; the chapter closes the incident.

And that is all the novel shows. The dismissal itself is never staged. By chapter 19 it is an accomplished fact, and chapter 20 confirms it through Li Nanny's own grumbling — the same nurse whose tea-drinking caused it, complaining that the maid is already gone. The offstage-ness is the point: a servant's ruin did not need a scene.

The two expulsions everyone knows 後例

Set beside her, the later cases are public events. Jinchuan teases back once too brightly in chapter 30, is struck and dismissed by Lady Wang on the spot, and drowns herself in a well; her death, attached to Baoyu's name, is half of what gets him beaten in chapter 33. Qingwen is taken in the chapter 77 sweep after the garden search — carried out ill, with her things thrown after her — and dies in her cousin's hovel. Fangguan and the little actresses are driven to nunneries in the same chapter.

Three expulsions in one book, and the first of them is the one without a witness. Readers looking for where the novel's casual cruelty begins should start at the tea.

Chapter attributions are the text's. Xueqian's dismissal being the first named expulsion is this site's count against the chapters cited; the novel does not rank its maids.

Where these figures come from 出處

• The novel in Chinese, chapters 8, 19–20, 30, 32, 77 — the tea night, the confirmation, and the later expulsions (read 6 Oct 2026)
• English Wikipedia, “Dream of the Red Chamber” — the maid characters and the garden search